Continued from Part 2.
08/03/18
Cab interior parts painted. No idea if these are prototypically accurate, and at this point I don't want to know. Good enough for once. As an experiment, after painting the black gauge faces, I tried scoring them with a knife to see if I could reveal the silver underneath, to represent the markings & needles. I'm amazed it worked. Should've done the same with the white gauges, being a more visible colour..
The seats are a bit crude but again, they'll do - you won't really see 'em. The timber effect was done by drybrushing washes over a tan basecoat, along with some scoring of the plastic before painting. The solvent-based glue has caused the seat tops to warp a bit, as when the solvent evaporates and the plastic re-hardens, the plastic shinks a bit. I'll try to straighten them.
The floor has yet to be weathered.
27/03/18
Attempts at fixing the paint on the bonnet are not going well at all.
After filling in the nearby panel lines with repeated sanding and recoating, and trying to scrape them out resulting in the paint just chipping away from the surrounding areas, I realised I'd have to strip everything back to bare plastic and start from scratch.
But can spray enamel be stripped without harming the plastic underneath? Some research suggested that soaking in rubbing alcohol might work.
It shouldn't harm the plastic shell, I already had a small plastic container with a rubber-sealed lid, filled with alcohol, to use as a stripping bath for removing factory paint from plastic HO parts. But that's acrylic stuff and "cool" lacquers..
So I stood the bodyshell in the bath overnight as an experiment.
Alcohol does work on enamel, but very slowly.
I'm gonna need a bigger bath and a lot of alcohol to strip this thing. Fortunately, I buy a 5L bulk bottle of alcohol every two years or so. So it works out around $5.40 a litre which isn't half bad. I could use meths which is only $3.50 a litre, but it's stronger stuff, and may harm the plastic.
A toothbrush took off the first layer of white, with the yellow underneath requring fingernails to remove - it needs more soaking. This is gonna take a long time.
Even so, the alcohol needed replacing twice, so I wound up using 2.5L of it. A plastic brush bit in the dremel was used to get into the corners.
04/05/18
The bodyshell is fucking finally painted.
Lesson learned: Don't allow yourself to spray in subpar lighting.
Why ever I let myself do it in poor light is nothing short of ludicrous.
I used Tamiya masking tape, very carefully applied, when spraying black over the yellow. Good stuff, highly recommend it.
Don't forget to spray a light coat of your base colour over the masked line and allow to thoroughly dry, before painting the next colour. It stops the new colour from bleeding under the tape.
The Darjeeling-Himalayan-type couplings from IP Engineering however, need a lot of cleanup. I've seen worse castings though, and these are certainly usable. Besides, at £4.50GBP - $8AUD for the pair, I'm not complaining.
One issue with these is that the rivet details aren't very well-formed, and they're not even in alignment with eachother. As I'm modelling a late 60's-mid 70's vintage loco, I don't want rivets anyway - A welded appearance is more appropriate in this case. Were I modelling something earlier, I'd still remove these lumps, and drill holes in their place, for HO track nails or dressmaker's pins to be glued in, their heads looking much better as rivets. The hole in the top for the hook will need drilling out, as it's not all the way through.
Now, unlike most of IP's couplings, it turns out these don't have an M3 stud embedded in the backside for a strong mount to the chassis. I've glued couplings onto wagons before, and it's always failed on me. These have a lot more surface area though, which I'm sure is fine when gluing them to a wagon chassis.
But this loco is expected to see use towing steam locos (and their trains) back to a siding after they run out of gas. So these couplings are gonna need to be properly mounted.
I decided to use M3 hex bolts & nuts to sandwich the couplings and headstocks together.
After removing the casting lines and rivet detail, I noticed the hollowed-out section inside both castings had a nice big 'wedge' of whitemetal, (reinforcing?) where I needed a flat area for the bolt head to seat..
..So removing the HSS tool in my Advance lathe's toolpost, I clamped a coupling in the toolpost and brought it up to the right height with whatever shims were around, making sure the casting was perpendicular to the chuck.
A small endmill was thrown in the chuck, and 2 minutes later I had a nice flat area for the bolt head to sit. This was repeated with the second coupling. The area under the hook mount was also milled flat, in case I need to add a reinforcing plate, as there's very little material to keep the hook in place.
Seems good, if a bit high for a sugarcane loco. Most cane railway couplings are pretty low-slung even today, due to the small 13" wheels most cane wagons have always rode on.
Most of my wagon couplings are around the standard 16mm scale height of 25mm.
As I'm modelling a fictional 3' gauge line, I figure I can get away with it.
I find the standard shape of coupling hook is too difficult to couple/uncouple, (despite using pliers) so I bend them over a bit. (left) In theory, this makes them more suseptible to coming uncoupled with rough track or rough shunting, but I've had no issues so far.
Looks ok, just needs blackening and trimming to size prior to guing in with JB Weld. As mentioned before, I am concerned about the lack of material in the hook's whitemetal mount, but will see how it goes in operation before doing anything further with it.
After a coat of etch and filler primers, the buffer face is cleaned with thinners. I will do the same after the red topcoat dries. By doing it now however, it'll leave an imprint under the red topcoat, so I can get a better idea of where to remove the red paint, without making an outline of primer visible around it.
This trick helps, but you will end up with a few spots of primer. To fix that, spray (or brush) a tiny amount of matt black paint onto a thumb-sized section of rag, then dip the painty section of rag in thinners. The wet patch of rag is then stretched over the tip of your index finger, and dabbed sparingly over the bare metal area of the buffer face, disguising the primer patches and takeing away the whitemetal's shine.
This could be repeated with a rusty brown colour, but I've not yet tried that, and can't say for sure how it'd look. I'd bet it looks quite good, but keep forgetting to give it a go.
Further weathering will come later.
15/05/18
Now that the body's painted, I can finally get the electrickery out of the way and fit the interior. Here, five wires have been run to both headlights and the strobe light. I've used the spare hookup wire from HO point motors. Very small stuff, and utterly brilliant for this sort of wiring. I've got enough for this job, but my supply's running low. Will have to find a place that sells it in rolls. Shops don't seem to have it..
The driver's desk and centre-console-thingy were made to have the head/strobe lights' wiring run through them. They still needed a little opening out to fit the five wires through. Some cheap ABS channel I have lying around was ideal to cover it all up. A bit overscale, but it's not that noticeable.
Working out routing for the head & strobe lights, around the existing electrickery in the bonnet.
I wanted to make it so that everything is connected with one plug to the chassis. This makes it easy to separate the chassis from the body, 'cause it will have to happen at some point.
Annoyingly, I couldn't find a 7-pin plug locally. The best I could find was a '6er. So the battery has it's own connector. This at least allows the battery pack to be removed entirely, should I ever need to.
The thinned section of bonnet wall to the right, was done months ago with the dremel, to make room for the headlight switch body.
24/05/18
I'd found a box of figures on a Farcebook garden railway group. None of them are particularly "Australian-looking", and I can't be fucked to mess around with putty and learn to make them look right, so this guy'll do. Maybe he's an Ex-Queensland Government Railways driver, of the fastidious type, showing up to drive cane trains dressed like he's driving the Sunshine Express up North. I've given him a new coat of paint, a little weathering with washes, and I'll call him "Luigi"..
01/06/18
After fitting the interior detailing, and the satin clearcoating of the body had cured, the loco was reassembled for a very quick test on the floor.
All seems surprisingly good. Only issues are a noticeable rod clank (more of an annoying 'tink' with every revolution of the wheels) that's appeared out of nowhere, and it had a tendency to 'waddle' a bit on these 2' radius Nequida curves. That's fine, because when we find a new place to live soon, the new line will have 4' raduis, minimum.
The clanking might go away after I actually lubricate the rods. The rods will need touchup painting soon, so I'd rather keep oil away from them until literally everything else is complete. As the rods just flap around for looks, running them dry for a 2-minute test run is fine by me. The main bearings have been oiled, though.
Apologies for the poor light in the living room.
04/06/18
I realised even in the 70's, cane diesels had fire extinguishers fitted, so I started thinking about how to make one in a suitable scale. After comparing the standard extinguisher sizes on Google with photos of locos, I settled on fitting the 12kg model. The dimensions were found and scaled down to 1:20.
Mostly machined from scrap aluminium, with the tank's radius formed with files on the lathe. The pin where the hose mounts, and the pivot pin are dressmaker's pins. The handle is folded up from some scrap steel. Shockproof superglue locks everything in place.
A very poor view of the completed interior shows there's hardly any room for the seats. I considered leaving them out, but wound up squeezing them in.
27/06/18
A 'base' for the strobe light was machined from aluminium. Not yet sure if I'll paint it. The windows have finally had their old glue scraped from the mating surfaces, and glued back into place, sealing the cab up again.
17/07/18
Final touchup of the paintwork has been causing headaches for over a month.
Normally, I spray whatever colour of paint I've used, into the can's lid, and use a small brush to to apply it. The can I used to spray the 'motion' with, was about 2 years old and getting empty. It ran out on another project, long after having sprayed these parts.
By the time these parts had eventually hardened, I reassembled them. I bought a new can of paint of the same brand/colour, and after a thorough shake, proceeded to start touching up. Somehow, this stuff turned out to be several shades lighter, so I let it sit for a week. Then another week. Then another. By the time it had hardened, the colour hadn't changed a bit. Fuck. So I tried some of the same colour, that came in a tin rather than an aerosol can - still a lighter shade. Okay, now I know the old spray can was at fault.
Que three weeks of procrastinating starting the annoying and time-consuming trial-and-error process of matching the colour in a spare paint jar. As the camera doesn't pick up the different shades too well, I've partially de-saturated the photo in the computer, to make the differences more visible. At this point, I'm having to test the colours directly on the motion (because it comes out differently on coffee stirrers, and wastes valuable material) - which once I finally get the colour right, was going to have to be airbrushed over the trial-and-error touchup patches anyway. This also requires the parts to be removed from the loco.
Of course it's obvious: I should've taken the fucking things off and resprayed them from the get-go. What's more, the headstocks and couplings will have to come off for respraying so they'll match, too.
21/07/18
One thing that's always bothered me with this loco, is the 1.5mm gap between the footplate and the bonnet, halfway up the length of the loco. I'd checked the plastic bodyshell and it's not deformed - it's perfectly straight. The 3mm steel footplate however, somehow has a 1.5mm bow in it.Looking back at the photos from when the loco arrived here, it's always had that gap. As I'd half-dismantled the chassis to repaint the red bits, I figured I'd better fix this footplate too.
22/07/18
All motion parts have been stripped to bare metal and etch primed. The speckled appearance of the primer here is because it's a new can and I'd not shaken it quite enough. These were lightly rubbed back and re-resprayed.
When fitting the couplings, I'd put a little shockproof superglue behind the couplings to keep them from swiveling on their mounting bolts. This had to be scraped off before cleaning and sticking to the timber with blu-tac. They're on the same bit of timber as the cranks/pins so they copped a bit of overspray. (more like splatter, I should swap out the nozzle on the etch primer)
The footplate took an absolute fuckload of club-hammer-beating to straighten it, and even then it's still not as good as I'd like. Steel isn't normally this tough, in my experience. Belting it with a hammer of course ruined the finish, so it was sanded back with emery, cleaned with meths and primed along with the motion parts.
I have no idea how something so tough could've gotten so deformed. It certainly hadn't had a whole lot of use before I got it, and there was no other damage to speak of. Despite being fitted with extra track pickups, the chassis looked to never had been disassembled, as the paint on the bolts was untouched.
My only possible guess is it could've happened at Accucraft's factory. Maybe the footplate was somehow dropped from 2 floors up, or it might've just come out poorly. Considering Accucraft's relatively abysmal quality control, none of this would surprise me.
Another issue with having to do this, was some of my wiring was superglued to the underside of the footplate to keep it out of the running gear. I tried separating it with several blades, but the wires were stuck too well, and I had no choice but to destroy the wiring, tearing it away from the steel and scraping away the remains. So now I've gotta remake ¼ of the fucking wiring.
If I'm remaking ¼ of the wiring and repainting ⅔ of the chassis, I might as well remove the flange from the middle wheelset, so the loco will tolerate 2' curves - for if there's ever a time I can't avoid them.
I originally mounted the wheel in the 3-jaw self-centering chuck of my Advance lathe, by the retaining boss pressed into the back of the wheel. This was to save having to go dig an axle out of the loco's parts box.
It was amazing just how much the wheel wobbled, regardless of how I set it in the chuck, so I had to go find the axle. Thanks Accucraft, for reminding me why I'll never buy from you again.
Of course it's on me, for having broken that old vow when I bought this loco..
As I'm relatively new to machining, It's hard to know when the cutting tools need resharpening. Machining steel is a great way to find out your tools are blunt as fuck, so the surface finish isn't great. I don't have the energy to be anal about much of these things any more, so it'll do. I did resharpen my cutting tools though.
14/08/18
After repainting, drying for a couple days, then baking in the oven at 70 degrees C for a few hours, the red bits are finally done, and the chassis can go back together. The rods are stored safely until they're needed.
I noticed there's no means of preventing the main bearings from spinning in their mounts. Slow clap for Accucraft, once again. The bearings and their spaces in the frames, were thoroughly cleaned with meths before final reassembly. A touch of cyanoacrylate was applied to the side of each bearing, using a fine applicator. They don't need much, just enough to make sure they won't move in service.
04/09/18
After reassembling the loco and checking it ran ok on a loop of plastic track in the garage, I was able to get on with touching up the paint on the chassis. Here, the grey bits have been etch-primed.
07/09/18
After the primer's cured, some red paint was sprayed into it's lid.
Annoyingly, just as I was about to start painting, I realised I'd fitted the front headstock (with it's threaded hole for the strobe light battery retainer) at the rear of the loco. This needed to be swapped over.
As the body had to come off to access all the headstock screws, I figured I better make the dummy radiator before I forget again. I made it the same way as in the Malcolm Moore build.
The front of the Baguley's bonnet was measured, and those dimensions transferred to a piece of 1mm styrene, and cut out.
Some KS Bond contact cement was then smeared over the plastic. When you apply it this thin, it dries very quickly. I had to wipe it off and do it again because I stopped to take the photo.
Before all this, I'd found a suitable piece of rag - a sleeve from old cotton T-shirt. After cutting it so it would lay flat, a clean, undamaged spot was chosen and ironed smooth.
After re-gluing the styrene, it was pressed onto the fabric, being very careful to align it with the "grain" of the fabric. This way, I get a scale radiator texture, with nice vertical lines.
After letting it sit for ten minutes, the fabric was cut closely to the styrene with scissors. The edges were gone over with cyanoacrylate to stop them coming loose, then tidied up with a sharp knife.
Like in the Malcolm Moore, the "radiator" is removable to make any future resprays much easier.
In the 'Moore, it just slots in between the front of the bonnet, and the battery pack.
Here, I've blu-tacked it. After all that, I finally touched up the red paintwork. There's a couple bits needing a touch of black, then I can clean, weather and satin clearcoat the chassis to match the body finish.
That's it for part 3. Next one will see the loco finished.
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